“We were hearing from authors in Cuba who wanted to know what it would cost to publish their book” through Lantia, the Spanish publishing platform headed by CEO Enrique Parrilla.

“And these were not the only cases of authors” in the Spanish-speaking world “without access to the funds they needed to publish. But we noticed that the works being submitted to us from Cuba were of extremely high quality.”

Parrilla says that the high literacy rate in Cuba, reported to be at around 97 percent, has created not only a strong culture of reading but also of writing.

“They’re good writers. And if you look at the books that are popular in Cuba, they’re dense. They like good literature and they like to discuss philosophy. These authors tend to have followers, too, and internationally. So when they submit their projects, crowdfunding often makes sense to them.”

“Maybe 20 percent of our work at Pentian is English-language,” Parrilla says, “and of the Spanish-language material, about 60 percent is from Latin America. Spain itself is only a small portion” of the overall output from Pentian, “maybe 30 percent.

“And this was a surprise to us. I guess it’s natural. We’ve begun to see authors from Chile, from Argentina, from Ecuador. If you’re an author in Ecuador, your local options are very limited. But through a window in the Internet like this, you can find funding.”

In Spain, meanwhile, Parrilla says that Lantia has had new success in getting clients’ print books into bookstores by using author events as a foot in the door. The company sets up an event—a reading, a book-signing—supplies the books, and the bookseller then sells as many copies as possible. The author, who has paid for the production of the work, owns any copies that don’t sell during the event.

What caused the need for this approach to local booksellers was traditional distributors’ demands for large runs and high copy counts. Bookstore distribution seemed out of reach for print-on-demand (POD) operations like Lantia, Parrilla says, because the volume of production wasn’t such that the titles could be offered to the stores through normal distributors.

“You could get into the stores if you had 50,000 copies,” says Parrilla, “but that ran counter to what we were trying to achieve: zero inventory” and print-on-demand.